


Malunion Fracture

by NonbinaryHylian (chicagoartnerd)



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Alien Flora & Fauna, Alien Planet, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prose Poem, Robo-gore, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 21:24:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19732048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicagoartnerd/pseuds/NonbinaryHylian
Summary: Megatron has been broken and remade so many times he no longer knows what it means to be whole.





	Malunion Fracture

**Author's Note:**

> This is mostly a Megatron character piece that I decided to write more like a prose poem than anything else. 
> 
> I went full Poet with this one folks. Hope it's an interesting or enjoyable read. I wanted to try something different!

Everything was wrong.

Error messages were fragmenting into tessellations and jagged black and technicolor blue pixels in his HUD. Fragments of unreadable messages flickered and strobed across his vision. He was in immense pain, but that wasn’t particularly disorienting, as he was often experiencing pain. 

The worst of the discernable sensations were the warm, wet, creeping tingles of something winding around his body. Up through his exposed joints and crables, pulsing and squeezing around his chest and head. Was it behind his optics too? Were all those dire blue soaked warnings turning a sickly shade of organic green? There was so little sensation left in his plating after all these years of tearing it to shreds. With what little there was to begin with as he had been built to survive hundreds of tons of rock collapsing on top of him, he could mostly just feel the slimey pressure of whatever it was. The slow grip of it winding through his joints and up over his neck. He couldn’t even shudder against the sensation. None of his motor relays were responding to manual commands. He wasn’t even sure he was issuing manual commands as he couldn’t make out any of the windows for them in his HUD.

Not for the first time in his life Megatron knew he was in the active process of dying. 

To be fair, he had been dying by degrees for millions of years before his mangled form had been hurtled through space and flung down on this planet covered in thick, impenetrable rain-forests. If he was feeling like being particularly self-flagellating he could say he had been made a dead thing. Cold-constructed for the sole purpose of being a tool of toil for the Empire. 

One way or another. 

By this point, he realized he had become what he had once hated most. He was the Empire now. All those mirror bright and glorious dreams of the freedom to choose, to live and die how they pleased, to be happy, had turned to ash in his hands and blown away when he had realized how impossible it all was. He had always craved control over his own fate, but it had become twisted over the years. He had tried. They had all tried. But it had been a lost cause. Because most people would always choose the safer route, the business-as-usual route, the route of submission to the inevitable grind of the wheel. Very few would ever dare to rise up, very few would be willing to lay down their sparks so that others could survive and one day thrive. Most people were selfish fools. 

He had done things, terrible things, unspeakable and unfathomable to his much younger and more idealistic self. It had warped him into hard uncompromising slag, he had become what the Decepticons had needed him to be. A tyrant to show them the error of their ways, a warlord to give them a purpose, the slagmaker for countless worlds fallen to their war so they didn’t have to think about what they had already lost. What they all had never truly been aloud to possess. 

There was nothing he could about it now though, he had gone far too deep to stop. There was no turning back on this road he had set himself on several million years ago. He would walk it until the Universe burnt itself out, or he ceased to function, whichever came first. 

He hated how dying tended to make him melancholy. Megatron had never believed in the afterspark and he wasn’t about to start hoping for one now. If he prayed for anything it was an end to all of this. Darkness. Peace.

Megatron rarely got what he hoped for. 

* * *

**_Fire._ **

His whole frame was melting, rivulets of coolant evaporating and hissing into the humid stink of the air. He could see nothing except the red now. 

Nyon was burning. Praxus. Vos. The vamparc ribbon sang hymns of stolen blood as it roared over the battlefield towards him. 

His dented black hands hovering above the smelting pit helplessly as one of the overseers grabbed him by the neck and shoved him out over it. The heat was so intense it made the air over the pit waver, the paint on his hands cracked against it. The overseer never stopped taunting him, waiting for him to beg for his meager existence. Megatron didn’t. The lure of the end was too strong. They had built them to know nothing but backbreaking work. Somehow they had all learned misery as well. 

Darkness so black it was red. The fire and the sky were red.

Then screams. His own, the screams of the other miners in the hollow magenta holes, buried alive waiting for a rescue that was never going to come. Their sparks eventually snuffing out in resignation. The civilians clutching their boiling gray frames as they couldn’t stop screaming. The sounds high and reedy, low and thrumming, merged and died in the crackle and roar of the inferno. 

The fire, _it burned._

Sliced, shivers, undulating, falling, deep.

Down, drowning, divided, dropped, doing.

**Never enough.**

grinding, drilling, falling, down, down, down

* * *

**_Slag_ **

Crystalline walls, a garden full of massive glowing blue rocks, the most beautiful incandescent rainbow imaginable flowing above with light and love. The air was a light touch against his face, the night sky a comforting blanket stretched out beyond the ring of light emanating from the crystals. His spark felt like the air around and the ground below, flying, free, floating and sure and solid at the same time. Impactor’s hand placed over his own, a faint kiss to the side of his helm. He shivered. Longing. This was more than he had ever had before. A world, a life. It flowered in his mind, thousands of possibilities, breathlessly floating towards something like fulfillment. Contentment. Here, in this place, in this moment his spark had known peace.

It was like the last candle in the guttering purple night. He could barely see anything else except for this one light. Nothing else truly mattered.

**_That long ago lost light, was meant to lead the way._ **

Flashes of it dispersed and bled out of his mind, leaving the ghosting memory of it behind.

* * *

_ Orion. _

His hand was buried up to his elbow obscenely in Optimus Prime’s chest. His very spark flickering and guttering in his palm, his whole frame shaking beneath him. Not in glowing love or true surrender but in battle. The eternal war between them. Oh how he desired him. Wanted with everything that he was the one thing he could never truly possess. 

He could crush it, kill it, degrade it beyond all recognition, but the spark fluttering so so delicately over the scarred metal of his palm would never be his. He could never own it. There was the hate, that old familiar friend. He could shake hands with it and smile. Hate was easy. Love was what hurt. Megatron burned.

All of joints below his waist howled. Realignment, rebirth, restitution.

Vesicant rained down on their combined forces. It wasn’t Gideon’s Glue otherwise they would have all been nothing but puddles of dead protoform by now. It still ate away at their plating, a vicious chemical burning towards their cores. He hadn’t ordered the deployment of this weapon, it must have been another of Starscream’s attempts at killing him, but it was too late to stop it now. 

His gray paint bubbled and peeled as the chemical hissed its way through the rough outer layers, seeking his circuits and rotors. It stung, the burn a low acid hum drenching him as he blasted his way through the space bridge gates, each one offlining in a dramatic boom of fizzling blue energy. He had to make it to the nexus of them, he couldn’t allow the Autobots to take it. Not now. He reached the final teleportation gate as his cannon’s internal wiring shorted out with a pathetic cough. It dropped to dead weight on his shoulder. The vesicant rain from above was eating through his optics now. 

He had other sensors at his disposal still and used them to tear his way into the central control panel. Megatron rerouted the core power generator and the whole gate blew in a violent explosion of blinding white fire. He felt his protoform start to evaporate under the heat and he grit his teeth so hard they shattered in his mouth, a mess of energon wet shards. The shock wave from the gate warped him away, blessedly somewhere cold. He felt his left arm disintegrate on the icy ground next to him and sighed.

_ The cold was a burn too.  _

* * *

The singing of metal on metal, sword to sword, vicious blow after clanging blow. They had wrenched off each other’s arms more than once with the force of their strikes. It was one continuous battlefield, a sea of fighting washing away the years of their lives. Every blow, every stroke, brought them closer together. Farther away too. He was his equal, his match in every way. Peeling back the frustrating and unimaginable layers. Yet they didn’t really know each other. Standing alone on opposite sides of a great chasm, like sentinel towers of a long forgotten Golden Age. Lies. Pillars of gold and glass that hid the truth. 

Both of them were falling apart inside. But Optimus Prime couldn’t admit it and that was why they still fought. Even now, even after all this time. That was a fire that never went out. Kick over the cold ash to reveal the still burning embers underneath. 

_ What did it mean to covet? _

To love?

Oh he had loved. 

Too much. Too many.

Love, lust, desire, despair, loneliness

**Every bit a grotesque never ending war.**

The glass shattered and he fell out through space again,  _ The Nemesis _ on fire above him. Explosions ripped through its hull silently in the vacuum. The only sign of its final destruction the hollow thump of its quantum reactors exploding and shoving him in a barreling pulse wave out into the empty void. 

There are no thoughts, no final regrets. Only the single sigh of resignation to the black. Take him. It wasn’t worth it. His Empire of perpetual destruction, the hungry beast of conquest he once fed desperately. Nothing. In the end he had suffered, they all had suffered, and it meant nothing to the Universe. 

_ Entropy. _ Megatron surrendered to it. 

* * *

It was a niggling drip at first.

Water on his face and neck. 

There was no color, just a sea of unending gray. His vision started and ended there. A soothing blanket of nothingness. The absence of meaning, of reason. A perpetual strip of calm. 

There was no fire here. No temptation. It was terrifying. To feel...this detached. Up until this point he had always felt. Even if that feeling was agony. Nothing but rage and emptiness and hate. 

Vile tasting, choking, sobbing. 

The red glow of his anger turning the night sky a low fallen rust. He had wrapped it over his shoulders like the finest armor, regalia, worn its twisting black thorns as a heavy leaden crown. He was the master of his rage as it glinted steely and piercing, the death blow to all their petty dreams in his massive black hands. The blade had no hilt, it turned his fingers to energon soaked ribbons. Cut another piece of him away every time he raised it. He kept using it anyway. His life’s blood dripped like rain over his fingers down into their waiting mouths. 

Hungry. His people were starving.

All of that was wiped away, left bald and smooth with disinterest. 

Megatron wanted to rip his chest apart and claw out this alien feeling of tranquility out by the root. 

**_Something was doing this to him._ **

Winding its way through his processor, pit maybe into his spark. Changing him, making him...weak. Nothing would ever unmake him. Not while he still held the will to fight. And if there was one thing he had never lacked for, it was willpower. 

He forced it from his mind, whatever it was. Megatron belonged to himself, only himself, nothing could ever hold him, possess him, not ever again. They could chain him down, beat him flat, squeeze every last dignity from his frame and he would still persevere. It was either survive or die. He wasn’t dead yet.

The thing left from behind his optics, uncoiling with a resigned sigh as he felt it uncoil from his frame as well. It seemed...disappointed in him. How? Why did he know that? What the frag had it done to him?! 

It was no longer inside of him though.

He had won. He was still ever himself.

It tasted like a bitter victory in his mouth. 

The messages in his HUD has disappeared. Megatron was able to move his neck, he looked down in astonishment to see that his entire frame had been repaired. All of his shattered struts, joints, and plating were fully restored. It should have been impossible. The only evidence that he had been in many fractured pieces when he had landed were the small almost white lines along the edges of every weld and repair. The damned organic thing he was lying in had fixed him. 

A dark realization washed over him. It had tried to fix him in more ways than one. 

Or perhaps the processor tampering had been necessary while it was healing his frame, yet he didn’t suspect so. The tree-like lifeform below him vibrated in an urgent emphatic way. Its electromagnetic field trying to urge him to some action. He was going to sit up and tear it apart if it kept nagging at him. He  _ felt _ it hum in exasperation. Megatron needed to get off this cursed planet immediately.

It was trying to help him, it fixed broken lifeforms, that was what its purpose was. 

That was what it felt. It had repaired his body but it longed to heal his mind. That was the message it was sending at him in little pulses and waves of intent. It swallowed his own field in its massive one and lapped up against it reassuringly. He hated it immediately. That seemed to amuse it. He belatedly realized that it could have killed him, cannibalized his parts and he wouldn’t have known the difference. Why? Why did it want to help him? 

It could tell he was tired.

It could tell he had been broken and remade so many times he no longer knew what it felt like to live a life more than to survive a death. He had been like this for so long and it hurt the organic thing to behold. It physically pained it to hold onto him like this. All it wanted to do was ease his suffering, give him a chance to be happy.

_ That baffled him.  _

If this thing remade him in that way he would longer be himself. He was never going to change. It was not in his nature to yield in such a way. Once he set his mind to something it would become a reality. 

It gently reminded him that he had gone as far as he could down this path he had made for himself. His choice to walk it had broken him in two. Megatron’s halves both incomplete. How? 

He needed to get this thing out of his processor.  **It had no right!**

It was just a massive pile of decaying, thriving, disgusting living matter. A nothing existence in the grand scheme of things. What the frag did it know about him, what he was, what had made him? Who had made him.

_ Everything. _

It had seen. 

And now what? He wasn’t going to surrender to this. Never. No he was not going to change, not for this thing, not for  _ him _ , not anyone. 

_ Sometimes surrender is not giving up but giving in.  _

_ Let it go, share your burden, be at peace. _

Peace? What did this monstrosity know of peace? What did he know of peace? 

This was...he did not want to do this right now. 

The massive network of vines, leaves, and bark  _ laughed _ at him. Its parts shaking and rustling in mirth all around him, it was disconcerting to say the least. And it made rage spike white hot inside his spark. 

_ You don’t have to share it with me mechling. You know who you want to carry your spark, let him take some of your load, walk a different road together. _

No. Not that. Never that. That wasn’t even surrender, it was suicide. He would not. This thing didn’t know, it couldn’t, how, how, how, how

His processor got stuck in a loop and it started to squeal behind his optics. The creature took one vine the size and circumference of his entire arm and slapped him on the back with it. Like it was trying to clear something blocking his intake not dislodge a particularly troublesome glitch in his thoughts. It worked though. Oh how he loathed this meddlesome thing. 

It reminded him too much of a certain self-righteous religious figurehead who was the leader of a certain dying faction. The thing stopped trying to thump him into submission and he felt its mind curl against his again. He tried not to shiver but it knew he was uncomfortable with it and withdrew slightly. The last thing it said to him, the weight of unspoken words hanging in his processor:

_ Do not be afraid Megatron of Tarn. You will be well. _

Which was ironic because the slagging tree creature let him fall, removing all the vines under him in one great shove. As he plummeted the green changed to a darker shade, its roots shooting out like giant spokes on a wheel away from the truly massive trunk of the tree. If he had thought to get proper scans of it he would have noticed its roots connected and flowed over the entire surface of the planet, and down below it. It removed its roots from the path of his descent and he fell past where the ground should have been. 

Deep down under the crust of the planet. 

When he hit the golden yellow sand below it didn’t hurt. The surface took his impact and rolled the force of it all around him in a shallow crater. He looked up and gaped. The shimmering sea of sand turned a pale blue in the darkness of the dappled light that filtering from up above. The ceiling above him was a massive tangle of twisting, shadowed green roots that went on forever in all directions.

He could see some of them jutting down into the sand like pillars. He was inside the planet. 

This hollowed out sea of sand must have been aquifer at some time. Now it was dry. 

That bothered him for some reason. A tingle of remorse. Why? No, he didn’t care about this planet or that distasteful meddling thing up above him. It didn’t mean anything to him. He felt no gratitude to it for saving his life. He hated it. The thing was a menace. 

Megatron didn’t like lying to himself because he could always tell when he was doing it. 

He preferred brutal truth to lies. The brutal truth was that he was...sad this planet appeared to be slowly suffocating under the weight of itself. That which was holding it together was also what would destroy it in the end. He paused. Damn that troublesome tree. 

He started walking, processing his change, and didn’t stop. 

Megatron wandered through the shifting landscape, the sand making it harder than it should have been to walk along in a straight line. He came to one of the pillars digging down below the sand, no doubt to find more water or whatever nutrients this creature needed to survive. Megatron started to climb. His processor routing through ways he could help the thing all above and around him. Perhaps he could contact the Autobots and... 

The lie wasn’t lingering, deception of himself was always a bad idea. He had been changed. Something in him had shifted and now he was different. That was terrifying. He was going to have to think about it to find it less so. Maybe if he thought too much he would find it more so. **Frag.**

He reached the base level among the roots of the massive tree after several hours of continual work and it left his shoulders and hands aching. The feeling was welcome though as it was the ache of a frame well used not whatever the pit damned pain was going on in his processor right now. 

He didn’t like changing himself. Change in the world all around was good, cathartic, but rebuilding yourself was dangerous. Doubly so when you had no idea what you were rebuilding yourself into. That was something he dreaded. Somehow he had taken the first shaking steps onto a new road, having no idea where it led. 

Megatron had to figure that out and fast, as his long range scanners told him there was a ship approaching his approximate coordinates. Too many what-could-have-beens and not enough what-weres. There were no words, no arguments to be made. Megatron had to change. That was it. That was all there was left for him to do. 

The ship was fast approaching his location standing at the base of the tree, his scanners informed him it was an Autobot scouting vessel. He pressed his palm against its trunk and ex-vented slowly as he rumbled. “I hope you’re right, otherwise you’ve just gone through all the trouble to repair me only to watch me be murdered against your trunk.”

The only thing he got back from it was a warm pulse of reassurance as he let his shoulders sag and leaned back against it. Megatron offlined his optics, it wouldn’t be long now, fall or fly this was the end of the ground. Only a gaping maw under a starless sky waited for him. 

He knew exactly who was on that ship. It was always him. It  _ would _ always be him. 

In the blankness behind his closed optics 

Life stretched out before him

a thin thread arching across the ages, taut and vibrating.

_ fragile _

The lightest of touches, a caress, a kiss

snapped, severed, gone

Loneliness slipped its arms around his spark and squeezed

_ surrender _

No.

_ submit _

Perhaps under the right circumstances.

_ Give In _

Now...

that was easier than it should have been

“Megatron?”

He onlinned his optics in a snap but otherwise didn’t move. Optimus Prime was standing over him, looming much too close, and he hadn’t even drawn his blaster on him. He was losing his touch it seemed.

Megatron sighed. “Prime. What do you want?”

Optimus was visibly taken aback. He still had his battlemask on of course but he knew him well enough to notice the expression beneath it. 

When Megatron made no further move nor spoke again he shifted nervously. “Do you know what happened to your ship, your soldiers? I must admit that seeing you whole and intact is baffling after we watched your whole armada being blown to smithereens by Quintesson ships.”

That got Megatron’s attention, as it was very much meant to do, but he wasn’t about to be deterred. “You didn’t answer my question. What do you want Optimus?”

The red and blue mech made a frustrated noise and rolled his optics. “I should think you’d want to know about the state of your faction first. The only other survivors from your ship we’ve managed to recover so far have been Skywarp, Thundercraker, and Soundwave. Your whole fleet is gone. We have designated Earth as a Cybertronian base of operations for the moment. Since both you and Starscream were assumed KIA that left Soundwave in charge. He has negotiated an armistice with us and we’ve combined our remaining forces to fight back the encroaching Quintesson."

"So imagine our surprise when we received a Decepticon distress beacon from this planet and Soundwave informed us it was yours. You’ve been missing for fifty years Megatron.”

That...explained some things he supposed. 

Now his question was even more relevant though. He grit his teeth and growled at him. “I’ll only ask one more time before I’m forced to throttle your stubborn aft. What are you doing here Optimus? What do you want from me? Or put simply, what do you want?”

Optimus froze and stopped his fidgeting. He seemed confused and deeply disconcerted. This was apparently not how he had pictured their exchange going. Optimus shrugged stiffly. “I don’t know Megatron. What is it you’re trying to get me to say?”

He threw his hands up with a groan. Foolish, righteously indignant, silly, glitched Autobots.

He glared at him, his bright red optics smoldering. “I’ve just had my frame completely rebuilt, my processor was practically fried mind you, by an alien tree and I find myself at the very end of my tether so I’ll be perfectly clear. You have made peace with my faction through Soundwave, you all are either holding your own or winning against the Quintesson, and you’ve had fifty years to think about it. Tell me now or leave me be, your choice.”

“Why did you come here Optimus? What is the point? Tell. Me.”

He lunged at the last words and grabbed him by the chest farring, pulling him in close. Optimus’s optics went comically wide as he flailed slightly and then slammed his arms down hard on Megatron’s shoulders. 

His voice was a strangled whisper when he spoke. “I...we...that is to say. Megatron. We all thought you were dead, believe it or not some of us grieved for you. I did. And seeing you here, shiny and in one piece after fifty years of thinking you were dead I've realized...I missed you.”

Megatron made a grunt of genuine surprise as Optimus leaned down, snapped his battlemask back, and kissed him soundly on the mouth. His hands moved from his shoulders to around the back of his neck deepening it. He practically melted against him and it felt like coming home. 

They had never kissed before and yet he knew it like he knew the hum of his fusion cannon powering up. The warm feral glow of it was so deeply familiar his spark clenched. Optimus opened his mouth wider and Megatron took his invitation to slip his tongue inside it as his hands rubbed up and down the Prime’s back.

When they finally broke apart they were both panting, their cooling fans having clicked on at full blast. Optimus pressed their foreheads together as he rumbled. “Was that a proper answer or do you want me to say it?”

Megatron huffed a laugh. Oh he was going to make him say it, and a litany of other beautiful things, but not yet. His tone was teasing as he ran his black hand along his silver cheek. “For now. Although I wouldn’t mind hearing your answer again, if you wouldn’t mind repeating it, of course.”

This time Optimus chuckled and leaned in, his lips brushing his as he spoke. “Gladly. As many times as you need. I am here to answer.”

His engine purred approvingly in his chest and Optimus looked down at him in shock again before Megatron could move him in closer and kiss him soundly. 

The tree behind him was radiating a smugness he didn’t like so he used his free hand to thump it on the trunk in admonishment. It’s field tickled with mirth and that got Optimus’s attention. They both pulled away as he looked up at the organism. He could feel its electromagnetic field as well. 

Megatron waved a hand at it dismissively. “My healer. It’s got a meddlesome personality that’s all too reminiscent of an Autobot so I’m sure you’ll get along fine. We’re both going to be back to bring it nutrients and repair the water system of this planet later though, so you might as well get acquainted now.”

Optimus stared at him as if he had sprouted horns and turned neon green. When he spoke his voice sounded strange, far off. “Megatron...you want to help this lifeform? You want us to help you, help it? You don’t? You aren’t? What the pit happened to you here?”

Megatron shrugged, he was uncomfortable with the results still but the Prime needed to know if they were going to make this work. He huffed. “I’ve changed. Oh don’t make that face I simply meant I am willing to compromise myself a bit more. And even I can concede what this creature did for me was a kindness I did not deserve. I’m not sparkless you know. I never would have lived this long if I was.”

That awed expression was back on Optimus’s face as he mumbled. “I’m going to ask you all about it later. I want every detail, but for now I’ll take you at your word because I find myself distracted by other possibilities...”

Megatron laughed and pulled him back against him as he leaned up against the tree’s massive trunk. “Oh Optimus it’s adorable that you think I’m going to let you frag me up against this giant aft of a plant but you haven’t earned that yet.”

He made an indignant strangled noise and Megatron laughed again. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed like this. Damn him. Damn the organic monster beneath them too. He was not getting out of this encounter unscathed it seemed.

Megatron ran a hand up one of Optimus’s blue finials and watched with pleasure as he shivered against him. “I want you to take me back to your base, you and Soundwave will brief me on the situation with the Quintesson, I will have a shower to get rid of the horrendous stench of this entirely too  _ green _ planet, and only then will we retire to your berth. It better be big enough to fit both of us because I don’t intend to leave it for several days.”

Optimus whined against him and it was best noise he had ever heard him make. His deep voice was raw when he spoke. “ _ Yes _ . Yes, that uh, that does sound extremely agreeable. A very solid plan. To answer your question it is, it’s a double wide berth, one of the only luxuries I’ve allowed myself during the war.”

Megatron chuckled. “Excellent. Then what are you waiting for Prime? Let's get going.”

Optimus yelped in surprise as Megatron pushed away from the tree, grabbing his wrist and pulling him over the roots towards where his ship had landed. 

Suddenly they were running hand in hand, fields alight with joy. The newness, the raw elation, he felt...he felt happy. There was a place for that feeling in his world again and he had found it. He was holding his hand and standing next to him in that space. 

Megatron had been reset. 

The healing wasn’t complete but it was good enough for now. Optimus tumbled into his arms as they rushed to close the bay doors to the shuttle and all he could think about was the strange rightness of it. The road was gone, where he walked he did not yet know. But he was no longer traversing it alone. That was enough. That was more than enough. 

**Peace.**

_a freedom from disturbance; tranquility._


End file.
